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We must be more explicit:
The Intellectual-Principle stands as the image of The One,
firstly because there is a certain necessity that the first
should have its offspring, carrying onward much of its quality,
in other words that there be something in its likeness as the
sun's rays tell of the sun. Yet The One is not an
Intellectual-Principle; how then does it engender an
Intellectual-Principle?
Simply by the fact that in its self-quest it has vision: this
very seeing is the Intellectual-Principle. Any perception of the
external indicates either sensation or intellection, sensation
symbolized by a line, intellection by a circle... [corrupt
passage].
Of course the divisibility belonging to the circle does not apply
to the Intellectual-Principle; all, there too, is a unity, though
a unity which is the potentiality of all existence.
The items of this potentiality the divine intellection brings
out, so to speak, from the unity and knows them in detail, as it
must if it is to be an intellectual principle.
It has besides a consciousness, as it were, within itself of this
same potentiality; it knows that it can of itself beget an
hypostasis and can determine its own Being by the virtue
emanating from its prior; it knows that its nature is in some
sense a definite part of the content of that First; that it
thence derives its essence, that its strength lies there and that
its Being takes perfection as a derivative and a recipient from
the First. It sees that, as a member of the realm of division and
part, it receives life and intellection and all else it has and
is, from the undivided and partless, since that First is no
member of existence, but can be the source of all on condition
only of being held down by no one distinctive shape but remaining
the undeflected unity.
[(CORRUPT)- Thus it would be the entire universe but that...]
And so the First is not a thing among the things contained by the
Intellectual-Principle though the source of all. In virtue of
this source, things of the later order are essential beings; for
from that fact there is determination; each has its form: what
has being cannot be envisaged as outside of limit; the nature
must be held fast by boundary and fixity; though to the
Intellectual Beings this fixity is no more than determination and
form, the foundations of their substantial existence.
A being of this quality, like the Intellectual-Principle, must be
felt to be worthy of the all-pure: it could not derive from any
other than from the first principle of all; as it comes into
existence, all other beings must be simultaneously engendered-
all the beauty of the Ideas, all the Gods of the Intellectual
realm. And it still remains pregnant with this offspring; for it
has, so to speak, drawn all within itself again, holding them
lest they fall away towards Matter to be "brought up in the House
of Rhea" [in the realm of flux]. This is the meaning hidden in
the Mysteries, and in the Myths of the gods: Kronos, as the
wisest, exists before Zeus; he must absorb his offspring that,
full within himself, he may be also an Intellectual-Principle
manifest in some product of his plenty; afterwards, the myth
proceeds, Kronos engenders Zeus, who already exists as the
[necessary and eternal] outcome of the plenty there; in other
words the offspring of the Divine Intellect, perfect within
itself, is Soul [the life-principle carrying forward the Ideas in
the Divine Mind].
Now, even in the Divine the engendered could not be the very
highest; it must be a lesser, an image; it will be undetermined,
as the Divine is, but will receive determination, and, so to
speak, its shaping idea, from the progenitor.
Yet any offspring of the Intellectual-Principle must be a
Reason-Principle; the thought of the Divine Mind must be a
substantial existence: such then is that [Soul] which circles
about the Divine Mind, its light, its image inseparably attached
to it: on the upper level united with it, filled from it,
enjoying it, participant in its nature, intellective with it, but
on the lower level in contact with the realm beneath itself, or,
rather, generating in turn an offspring which must lie beneath;
of this lower we will treat later; so far we deal still with the
Divine.
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